Okay, this helps, and I think I am getting closer. So I guess Xen's desire is to have dom0 be able to maintain the name "eth0" as it's primary interface, but switch it to a virtual interface, kind of like the virtual interface that the domUs are bound to (e.g. vif0.1). I guess my next question will be about routing :)
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Chad HuneycuttJul 18 '09 at 6:31

Your renaming scheme wouldn't work because peth0 is "Physical eth0", and your way you'd end up with peth0 being the virtual interface.

Honestly, I think Xen's bridging stuff is utter balls, and I just use the OS' native bridging configuration setup (/etc/network/interfaces makes this beautifully easy), and then just tell the domU's config which bridge to attach to. I also name all my bridges with meaningful names (which helps because we've got VLANs everywhere, and they're all meaningfully named too).

I think I am having trouble understanding whether physical or virtual even matters inside a bridge, since it is all mixed together. I imagine I will end up doing the bridge myself as well once I figure this out, because, like you, I intend to trunk vlans to the dom0 ultimately.
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Chad HuneycuttJul 18 '09 at 6:33

I tend to think of a bridge as just like a switch, with the physical interface just a network cable to another switch, and the virtual NICs (and the interface associated with the bridge) as the cables to the NICs for the various physical and virtual machines.
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wombleJul 18 '09 at 7:31